To local faithful, 'black mass' no match for power of prayer

May 13, 2014|Dan Sheehan | In The Burbs

Up at Harvard, the good guys won.

Far beyond Harvard, actually. For all the chatter about free expression and cultural context and historical interpretation, the re-creation of a Satanic black mass planned at that campus earlier this week ended up being no more than a pointless provocation against people of faith. Its abrupt cancellation was a gratifying pushback against nonsense in academia.

Lehigh Valley Catholics were among the countless faithful who called out the Harvard students after learning of the blasphemous parody. Initial reports that the event would include a consecrated host — which Catholics believe to be the actual body of Christ — were wrong, but the fuse had already been lit.

Churches across the country, including the Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Bath, organized hours of prayer in protest and reparation. Harvard's president called the event abhorrent, though she left the decision in the hands of the students.

In the end, the pressure was such that the campus pub scheduled to host the event canceled, and no other venue was willing or able to step in.

"For me, [the cancellation] proved the power of prayer," said Mary Bem, a registered nurse from Bethlehem who is vice president of Juventutem Lehigh Valley, a group for young Catholics that arranged the event at Sacred Heart. "To see all the Catholics who came together for reparation was just a very powerful moment."

The church was close to full, Bem said. She wasn't surprised, given the gravity of the subject.

"The black mass is a mockery of the Catholic faith," she said. "That calls us as Catholics to stand up. We are the Church Militant. We are here to stand up for our Lord. This is our duty as Catholics."

Some argue the cancellation was a bad thing, a hampering of academic freedom because of the hypersensitivity of thin-skinned religious folk.

Perhaps so. Catholics are famously oversensitive about having their most cherished rites and beliefs profaned by make-believe devil worship in Ivy League bars.

Make-believe is just the right term. The whole wretched thing was a sham, perpetrated by the best and brightest of academia in the hearty spirit of adolescent dumb-assery.

To begin with, the group enlisted to put on the mass, the Satanic Temple, doesn't consist of dark arts practitioners, as its name and symbology would have you believe.

It is, rather, a group of secularist provocateurs who have drafted a Satan of literature — the moody, romanticized rebel of Milton's "Paradise Lost" — as a mascot in the war against what they deem to be unjust authority.

In other words, the Satanic Temple doesn't believe in Satan, except as a symbol. The Christian, of course, believes in Satan as reality, an angel whose fall was precipitated by prideful self-regard in opposition to the purest good.

Whether they believe in Satan or not, the group's plan to re-enact a black mass demanded Catholic action, said Larry Meo of Allentown, a DeSales University graduate student who is president of Juventutem Lehigh Valley.

"It's still very dangerous from a spiritual standpoint," he said. "They may not know what they're doing, but it demands an act of reparation … . To make reparation for such a grave sin is not to be taking lightly."

Some of the Satanic Temple's tenets sound commendable. They preach compassion and empathy toward all living things. They say the freedom of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend, which is surely in keeping with American tradition. This, perhaps, is why they are raising money for a statue of Satan to place beside a Ten Commandments monument in Oklahoma.

According to an essay on the group's website — which offers "I (Heart) Satan" T-shirts among other merchandise — "Satanism is not mindless abandon and depravity, but a philosophy that drives us to lead fruitful and dignified, epicurean lives."

Epicurean? That refers to a philosophy derived from the teachings of the Greek Epicurus. It holds earthly pleasure, mental and sensual, to be the highest human good.

And this is where Satanists — the traditional kind and the low-calorie version we are dealing with here — diverge from Catholics and people of other faiths, who believe the highest human good is to seek and attain the divine good.

That's why the faithful recognize certain acts as wrong, even if they don't appear to harm anyone. They are an offense against God, the author of good.

This leads to the paradox of faith, which is freedom by restriction. A Catholic, for example, in adhering to the rubrics of worship, in fasting, in denying sensual pleasures no matter how tempting, is not being hogtied by church authority but is engaging freedom of will in pursuit of the eternal.

The epicurean — or Satanist, or libertine, or whatever term you prefer — employs free will, too, but to what end?

I would contend that it's possible to debate these questions without resorting to such crudities as ersatz black masses. Would Harvard host a mock lynching to shed light on the history of the Ku Klux Klan? Surely not.